Africa Focus: El Nino threatens life disruption in Mozambique

Mozambique is one of many countries feeling the strain of El Nino, which has dried up rainfall across southern Africa over the last year, killing crops and disrupting hydropower production.

Although various factors have contributed to the area's food security issues in recent years, for this year, extremely high temperatures, low rains despite being in the rainy season, weaker food production and more threats of food insecurity are dominating the news of main media houses in Mozambique's capital city Maputo, all ascribed to El Nino.

"In Mozambique, the last time we experienced a strong similar El Nino phenomenon was in 1998," said Gabriel Nequice from Mozambique's Meteorologist Institute.

"From then on, it has not been to the extreme as we are feeling it now in 2014/2015, actually, since 1950, this has been the extreme we ever felt," Nequice told Xinhua in an interview.

Gabriel said that this phenomenon is characterized by high temperatures in the south and central parts of the country.

"In normal circumstances, temperatures rise up to level 1.6 or 1.8 with El Nino, but now we have recorded levels at 2.3, and the other things is that by this period the temperature should be going down but it is not, it continues going up which means by the end of our traditional rainy season the month of March, we may continue with this phenomenon," fears Gabriel.

Thus, it means more than 70 percent of the country's population who rely on rains to produce food as their only income source may face an uncertain future this year, the meteorologist added.

The effects of El Nino have already impacted the country's hydro resources, and in Maputo, authorities from Ara-Sul, a Mozambican body responsible for the management of waters for irrigation and domestic consumption in southern Mozambique, have already issued their alert saying that the flow levels are going down in a concerning manner.

"We have a number of dams where water is below 50 percent because of low precipitation, this has forced us to put in place a number of restrictions when discharging waters in some of the dams," said Helder Chongo, the director of Ara-Sul in southern Gaza province.

Despite the level of waters dropping at least 1 centimeter a day, Chongo is confident that the occasional rainfalls that might occur during the season will help balance the levels of water in the dams, to allow Ara-Sul continue its water discharges until the situation returns to normal.

Until now, the phenomenon has started to seriously impact people's living conditions, and the Mozambican Food Security Secretariat (SETSAN) has conducted a survey and concluded that nearly over 136,000 people are facing food insecurity due to the drought, most of them in south part of the country, Gaza province alone with 77,000 people and 27,000 in Maputo province.

"We fear that those numbers may increase, because along with this, there are more people who still had few food supplies and depend on the current agriculture season to restock, but predictions show that this campaign will hardly be positive," said Paulo Numene from SETSAN.

If the predictions from the meteorologist are proved right, Ara-Sul will face serious problems when it comes to provide enough water for irrigation. In fact, provincial authorities in Maputo announced that 10,000 hectares of agricultural food production are lost due to droughts.

Education authorities in southern Mozambique are also concerned with the scenario, particularly in Gaza province where the majority of school dropouts were registered last year due to hunger caused by lack of rains.

"We are going to move on with the opening of the academic year 2016, we fear though, that we might face serious challenges when it comes to turnout of pupils in the communities because of the drought which is worse than last year," said Orlando Matavel, deputy provincial education director in Gaza.

In Mozambique this year, everywhere south of the Zambezi river, the forecast for rainfall is below normal for the immediate future. North of the Zambezi, however, the situation is different, with a forecast for January to March of normal to above normal rains. Indeed, serious storms have been battering parts of the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Enditem